The prizes are Britain’s oldest literary awards, given out by the University of Edinburgh. Two prizes, each of £10,000, are awarded annually for the best work of fiction and the best biography published in the previous year. Past winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Graham Greene.

Miller is joined on the shortlist by Solace by Belinda McKeon, You and I by Padgett Powell and There But For The by Ali Smith, who is nominated for the second time. Find out more about the prize and see the shortlist for the biography award on the JamesTaitBlackPrizewebsite.

Another Man Booker Prizes author with a new novel out is Peter Carey who spoke to NPRabout The Chemistry of Tears, the use of a dual narrative, and humans as inventors and victims of technology. Carey’s new novel was also picked as the Huffington Post’s ‘TheBookWe’reTalkingAbout’.

If you follow TheManBookerPrizeonFacebook, you will have seen that Julian Barnes will publish a pamphlet titled A Life with Books, an essay specially commissioned for IndependentBooksellersWeek. In the essay, Barnes writes about his early awareness of books, his obsessive book-collecting, and time spent in second-hand bookshops around the country. He ends by praising the physical book and expressing the confident hope that it will survive.